Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [43]
So . . . which among them had been tempted into hubris by the dowager empress, and Ba Lura? For that matter, how had she contacted them all? If she'd been working on her plan for twenty years, she'd had lots of time . . . still, that long ago, how could she have predicted which men would be satrap governors on the unknown date of her death? The governors must have all been brought into the plot quite recently.
Miles stared narrow-eyed at the list of his eight suspects. I have to cut this down somehow. Several somehows. If he assumed Lord X had personally murdered the Ba Lura, he could eliminate the weakest and most fragile elderly men . . . a premature assumption. Any of the haut-lords might possess a ghem-guard both loyal and capable enough to be delegated the task, while the satrap governor lingered front and center in the bier-gifting ceremonies, his alibi established before dozens of witnesses.
No disloyalty to Barrayar intended, but Miles found himself wishing he were a Cetagandan security man right now—specifically, the one in charge of whatever investigation was progressing on Ba Lura's supposed suicide. But there was no way he could insert himself inconspicuously into that data flow. And he wasn't sure Rian had the mind-set for it, not to mention the urgent necessity of keeping Cetagandan security's attention as far from her as possible. Miles sighed in frustration.
It wasn't his task to solve the ba's murder anyway. It was his task to locate the real Great Key. Well, he knew in general where it was—in orbit, aboard one of the satrap governors' flagships. How else to finger the right one?
A chime at his door interrupted his furious meditations. He hastily shut down the comconsole and called, "Enter."
Ivan trod within, looking extremely dyspeptic.
"How did it go?" Miles asked, waving him to a chair. Ivan dragged a heavy and comfortable armchair up to the comconsole, and flung himself across it sideways, scowling. He was still wearing his undress greens.
"You were right. It was taken by mouth, and it metabolizes rapidly. Not so rapidly that our medics couldn't get a sample, though." Ivan rubbed his arm. "They said it would have been untraceable by morning."
"No permanent harm done, then."
"Except to my reputation. Your Colonel Vorreedi just blew in, I thought you might like to know. At least he took me seriously. We had a long talk just now about Lord Yenaro. Vorreedi didn't strike me as a booted paranoid, by the way." Ivan let the implication, So hadn't you better go see him?, hang in the air; Miles left it there.
"Good. I think. You didn't mention, ah—?"
"Not yet. But if you don't cough up some explanations, I'm going back to him for another pass."
"Fair enough." Miles sighed, and steeled himself. As briefly as the complications permitted, he summed up his conversation with the haut Rian Degtiar for Ivan, leaving out only a description of her incredible beauty, and his own stunned response to it. That was not Ivan's business. That especially was not Ivan's business.
" . . . so it seems to me," Miles ran down at last, "that the only way we can certainly prove that Barrayar had nothing to do with it is to find which satrap governor has the real Great Key." He pointed orbit-ward.
Ivan's eyes were round, his mouth screwed up in an expression of total dismay. "We? We? Miles, we've only been here for two and a half days, how did we get put in charge of the Cetagandan Empire? Isn't this Cetagandan security's job?"
"Would you trust them to clear us of blame?" Miles shrugged, and forged